Digital images are a common form of data in modern society. Use of digital photography is spreading rapidly among professional and amateur photographers. The use of traditional (film) photography is declining. The quality of digital photography is constantly improving. Digital images may be stored practically forever without reduction in image quality. Prices for equipment to take, store, and print high resolution digital images are rapidly declining. As a result of this sweeping transformation to digital photography, some camera makers have stopped producing traditional cameras.
An additional reason for the extensive use of digital images is the tremendous growth of the Internet. Images on the Internet may be saved and displayed only in a digital form. There are many millions, perhaps billions, of images on the Internet.
Additional advantages of digital photography lie with easy manipulation (editing, processing) of the images. Digital image processing has become a significant form of image processing because of continuing improvements in techniques and increasingly powerful hardware devices. Digital image processing techniques have augmented and, in some cases, replaced methods used by photographers in image composition and dark room processing. For example, digital image processing techniques such as contrast balancing, edge sharpening, color balancing or retouching of defects are employed for editing original photographic images. Moreover, with the aid of a computer, digitized images can be edited to achieve a variety of effects, which are hard or impossible to achieve with traditional photography, such as changing the shapes and colors of objects and forming composite images.
Until recently, real-time editing of digital graphic images was feasible only on expensive high-performance workstations with dedicated, special-purpose, hardware. The progress of integrated circuit technology in recent years has produced microprocessors with significantly improved processing power and has also reduced the costs of computer memories. These developments have made it feasible to implement advanced graphic editing techniques in personal computers. These editing techniques, however, are typically complex and require a technical and/or artistic expertise beyond that of ordinary users of personal computers.
For example, image compositing is a digital image processing technique that merges unrelated objects from multiple images. The result is a new scene that may never have existed physically. Image compositing has gained widespread use in photography. Image compositing operations, however, typically require a complex procedure for compositing the various images in order to achieve the desired effect. Thus, although the standard PC of today is capable of implementing these complex procedures, the average user is not.
Software for performing various image processing operations can be very expensive. Also, advanced graphical packages can be hard to learn and use. Creation of a complex digital image may require substantial technical or artistic skills. Thus, there is a need for digital imaging processing systems and methods, which may produce desired digital images in a cost-effective and timely manner, without requiring either technical or artistic skills from the user.